Many children learning English as an additional language (EAL) show reading comprehension difficulties despite adequate decoding. However, the relationship between early language and reading comprehension in this group is not fully understood. The language and literacy skills of 80 children learning English from diverse language backgrounds and 80…

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been some cross-orthographic comparisons between alphabetic scripts and the hiragana syllabic script. One of the theoretical motives for these comparisons is the hypothesis that phonological awareness is related to the size of the phonological unit mapped by the orthography, with phoneme…

This study evaluated the influence of the frequency of reading and writing habits (RWH) associated with education on the performance of adults in brief neuropsychological tasks. A sample of 489 Brazilian subjects, composed of 71% women, aged 21-80 years, with 2-23 years of formal education, was evaluated by the Brazilian Brief Neuropsychological…

"Metalinguistic skill" has emerged as an important measure of the sophistication of an individual's mastery of language. Some of the impetus for studies of metalinguistic skills, stemmed from an interest in its contribution to the acquisition of literacy. The central debate in these studies has been the issue of whether metalinguistic skills…

Determines the nature and role of knowledge constructed by the child at the very beginning of his or her contact with printed words, i.e., during the logographic phase. Indicates that the letters in a word serve as its identifying visual properties as long as, for the child, the sole function of the written language is to encode meaning. (SG)